My talk on genius

I have been invited to give a talk on the topic of genius on Friday, August 18th. The talk is part of a series of monthly events organized by a group known as the Cleveland chapter of Creative Mornings. It is a global program with chapters in cities all over the world and each month all chapters feature programs on a single theme and this month it is genius. You can learn more about the event here and on Facebook and on this month’s theme here.
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An LGBTQ brigade is fighting ISIS in northern Syria

It is not easy keeping track of the many, many militant groups that are currently engaged in a macabre dance of death in the Middle East with ever-changing partners and all identified by a confusing alphabet soup of acronyms. But Meredith Tax writes about a development in an autonomous Kurdish region of northern Syria called Rojava that took me completely by surprise.
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Nice optical illusion

I have always been intrigued by optical illusions, seeing them as providing fascinating insights into how the brain works as well as warnings that what we think we see may not accurately represent what is actually there. I found this illusion (via David Pescovitz) to be particularly intriguing because the contradiction is so stark. You know that the four horizontal blue lines must be parallel because the background black and grey objects are all the same size, and yet to my eyes the top and third line unmistakably slope up to the right while the second and bottom lines slope down.
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Why the pre-dawn raids?

Today comes a new report that the Trump team was rattled by learning yesterday that the FBI had conducted a pre-dawn raid on the home of Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort and taking away boxes of stuff. The raid was presumably done at the request of Robert Mueller, the special counsel who is investigating various charges involving the Trump campaign and Russian involvement in it plus matters arising from it.
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The Trump administration opens new war on affirmative action

The Trump Justice Department is investigating a complaint by some Asian American groups that Harvard University discriminates against Asian students by requiring them to have higher scores than all other ethnic groups in order to gain admission. This complaint is backed by some of the same groups that have sued universities in the past, claiming that their admission policies discriminated against white people
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Evangelical Christian leader calls for war with North Korea

Robert Jeffress is an evangelical pastor who has been a steadfast supporter of Donald Trump and even said during the election campaign that he would never support a presidential candidate who embodied Jesus’s message, saying ” I would run from that candidate as far as possible, because the Sermon on the Mount was not given as a governing principle for this nation.” Now Jeffress claims that his god has given Trump the “authority to take out Kim Jong-Un” and go to war with North Korea.
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The runaway train gains speed

During the days of the George W. Bush presidency when the country was dragged into disastrous wars on the lies propagated by Bush, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, and others, Tom Tomorrow had a cartoon where he ‘explained’ how it came to be that Bush and Cheney had embarked on this disastrous course. The cartoon said that the two had actually been pot-smoking hippie radical friends in their youth and carefully planned a long time ago to pretend to be arch-conservatives so that they could rise to power and destroy the US from within by advocating policies that would destroy it.
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How hospitals and insurance companies rip you off

Adam Conover of Adam Ruins Everything explains why it is that health care costs per capita in the US are the highest in the world and so uneven. It is because of a bizarre pricing system (encoded in a book called the Chargemaster) that has been cooked up between medical care providers and the for-profit health insurance companies system that negatively impacts everyone but is most devastating on those who are the least capable of dealing with it – the uninsured.
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